Monday, February 25, 2008

New PC=Back at Last!

The old puter was just getting on my nerves. It was down to a crawl, frequent crashes and freezes, spontaneous reboots for no readily apparent reason; such things test a persons limits. My last time on the virtual felt was back in early/mid January at a Mookie. It had been happening like clockwork for months, about 15-20 minutes into the game and it would start lagging. The cards would be dealt, and I would only see one of mine with the other frozen mid-air. I could hear the chips being slung for hands folded, but my screen would be frozen. Then about five seconds after my warning buzz, my card would finally “fall” and I would have about 5 seconds to look at my card, analyze the action thus far and then decided what to do. Once this starts, every few minutes it happens more often. It takes about 15 minutes before it’s happening 3-5 times per orbit, puts me on pc tilt, makes me spew chips for a bit then I do a reboot. From the time I tell it to reboot till I would have the game back up and running….five minutes, if it was a good day.

That machine has been pass on to a friend now (and yes, I wiped the drive five times and reformatted it before reinstalling the OS) and the new machine has thus far been a dream. I ordered all of the parts over a period of about 3-4 weeks, moved all of my files to my external eSATA drive on Thursday, built the new machine on Friday and installed the new OS Friday evening and spent most of that night applying updates and installing drivers. Saturday was for software installs and file transfers, oh and the live poker game. Sunday was actually using the new rig and getting used to it, I went with the 64 bit OS as I will be bringing it up to 8GB of RAM in the next few weeks.

The big test will be tomorrow and Wednesday, as I return to the virtual felt for the BoDonkey, and the Mookie. With the new 22” wide LCD I can fit four tables up without having to resize the tables and only minimal overlap on them. Hell, now that I’m thinking about it, I just may have to play the Skillz game just to see how everything goes.

Case: Antec P182

PSU: Antec TPQ-850

DVD: Asus 20X DVD w/ LightScribe

Speakers: Logitec X-540 5.1

Monitor: Samsung 226BW 22"

HD Tuner: KWorld TV Box 1680ex

MoBo: GA-X38T-DQ6

HS: Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme

Fan: Scythe SSF21F

CPU: Intel E8400 (Core 2 Duo, 3.0 GHz, Wolfdale core)

Thermal: ArticSilver 5

RAM: OCZ Platinum 2 x 2 GB DDR3 PC1066 7-7-7-20

Graphics: PowerColor HD3870

OS: Vista Ultimate 64 bit

WebCam: Logitech 9000

HHD: WD2500KS x 4 (250 GB ea., 16MB cache, SATA II) in a RAID 10

Keyboard: MS 4000

ExtHDD: 250 GB eSATA/USB 2.0

Reader: Rosewill Multi w/ FDD

Next weekend will begin the adventures in overclocking the system. I figure I should be able to get it up to 4.0 GHz without too much effort, but I will probably set it to 3.8 GHz for everyday settings.